He Remembers the Screams

Decades after World War II when Thomas Blatt met one of his former captors from the Nazis’ Sobibor death camp, he wasn’t scared of the man himself; he was scared of how normal the man seemed.

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He was spared at the camp and made a servant while his family and thousands of others — the death toll from Sobibor is believed to be more than 250,000 — were killed. Blatt remembers the cold efficiency of the camp’s gas chambers.

“I heard a terrible scream,” he said. “It lasted for about 15 minutes. It went very fast.”